Foundry Group Invests in Attachments.me

Tired of not finding what you are looking for when you search your email system? If you know the person who sent the message you are looking for, you might have some luck. But if you are looking for information contained within an attachment, link, or if you’ve forgotten who the sender was, you are most likely in trouble.

But maybe not. We are pleased to announce our investment in Attachments.me, which is building a natural-language based platform to extract information from attachments and links contained within a user’s email store. The company has created an email enhancement tool to enable easy access to the treasure trove of valuable data currently trapped within email systems. Attachments.me indexes a user’s email account and presents an attachments-centric view of it, creating document thumbnails, providing search within attachments, and, above all, makes a user’s email experience better and more productive.

Imagine that you remember someone sent you a document about a particular subject or a funny video. You just don’t remember who sent it to you or what the email text was. Now, you will be able to search by subject matter embedded in links and attachments, and browse by content type, not just by sender, and the results will include not just data in the email body itself, but in the attachments and links themselves.

This mailbox crawling technology will allow for a single searchable interface to automatically group and filter the structured data and documents in a user’s email archive. This data will also be accessible via mobile applications for on-the-go access. Attachments.me recognizes the fact that for most users, email is their de-facto filesystem, knowledgebase and personal information manager, and that better tools are needed to access and manipulate the extremely valuable data in the messages a user sends and receives.

The company was founded by Jesse Miller, Benjamin Coe and has been advised since inception by our friend and colleague Joe Stump, who is also a co-founder of our portfolio company SimpleGeo.

Cool idea, and looking forward to checking it out. I was using Xobni to help with this for awhile but struggled because it wasn’t geared specifically towards attachments, and it dragged down Outlook’s already-slow performance too much for me.

Joe, will you guys have a paid-premium option or will this be entirely ad-based supported? In other words, can I expect this service to be entirely free for me as a user? What about small businesses/organizations?

This could be an interesting service, especially if it is not focused exclusively on local client based programs like outlook or thunderbird. The trivial problem of searching for attachments could be overshadowed by other apps quickly. However, if this was part of Google Apps or other non-client based services then it might just dominate.